complexity

Unlocking Systemic Change: Reflections on facilitating a Policy Engagement Workshop Applying the Four Keys and PDIA

In today’s complex world, driving meaningful social and policy change requires more than incremental improvements—it demands systemic shifts. In this blog, I describe and reflect on my experience of drawing from a tool from Problem Driven Iterative Adaptation and applied the Four Keys for shifting systems  to facilitate a strategy discussion with policy researchers from […]

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My discovery of systems through the words of Jane Jacobs

In 2005, I had been living for over two years, in Kampong Thom, central Cambodia. I was working on community development and local governance participation in local governance in a GTZ (now GIZ) rural development programme. I also worked on my PhD research on education decentralisation and community participation in school management, which I did

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‘Food policy as doing.’ An example from the 1970s from Finland of how to solve a complex social and economic problem with a system approach.

Thank you to Adam Kremeia for sharing with me this Guardian Long Read about the failing food systems in the UK and for pointing me to the experience from Northern Karelia in Finland. The article is titled We need to break the junk food cycle’: how to fix Britain’s failing food system. It is a very

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Organizational Sensemaking – IResearchNet

Organizational sensemaking is not an established body of knowledge; it is a developing set of ideas drawn from a range of disciplines (e.g., cognitive psychology, social psychology, communication studies, and cultural analysis) concerning a particular way to approach organization studies. Central to the sensemaking perspective is the notion that explanations of organizational issues cannot be

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Podcast – Bridging education research with policy and practice. In conversation with Prof. Elina Lehtomäki of the University of Oulu

Every year I travel a couple of times north to the city of Oulu to give a class on development theories to the master students at the Faculty of Education at the University. The master course is part of the work of the interdisciplinary research group called Education, Diversity, Globalisation and Ethics. The group examines

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